


The Causality of Small Things

by Palebluedot



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Eggnog, I got hit with some Big Feelings about their respective relationships to the future, M/M, Pre-Relationship, non-specific timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-14 13:43:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16913943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Palebluedot/pseuds/Palebluedot
Summary: "There's something you want to ask me, isn't there?”Duck, half-risen from his chair, slowly sinks back down. “Aw, hell,” he mutters under his breath. “Yeah. There is.”Indrid waits.“Do I fuck it up?” Duck blurts out.





	The Causality of Small Things

It's been perhaps an hour since Duck knocked on the door of the Winnebago mumbling about “Pine Guard business,” but although this business was straightforward, culminating in only the scrawling of two names across a scrap of paper which Duck stuffed into his pocket, Duck has not yet said his goodbyes. Instead, he remains seated across the cluttered countertop from Indrid, making smalltalk with his hands firmly frozen around the mug of eggnog before him that has long since gone cold.

Finally, Indrid puts a hand out in front of him, open palm.

“...and I mean, we don't see a _lot_ of bears out there, but y'know, probably more'n the average — oh.” Duck rubs the back of his neck, looking embarrassed. “Sorry, guess I've kinda been goin' on and on, and you're probably busy and all —I should go.”

“No, it's quite all right,” Indrid says, and it's the truth. It's nice to have company, and he's content enough to listen to the endless this-and-that about the forest. Or, he would be, if he didn't know what it looked like when somebody was stalling. “But there's something you want to ask me, isn't there?”

Duck, half-risen from his chair, slowly sinks back down. “Aw, hell,” he mutters under his breath. “Yeah. There is.”

Indrid waits.

“Do I fuck it up?” Duck blurts out.

“I'm sorry?”

It's fascinating to watch, the small contortions of Duck's face, the furrowing of his brow, the tightening and twisting of his mouth. Pain, doubt, determination, all as one. “I just mean — you see the future. And I've spent my whole life tryin' not to think about mine. But then there was a monster, and I kinda _had_ to think about it, and now, I just can't stop. I'm worried about it all the _time._ And I know it's complicated, and it's always changing, nothing's set in stone and all that, but I figure, if anybody might know if I'm just gonna...trip over my own destiny and crack my head open on the end of the world or not, it'd have to be you, so. Thought I'd ask.”

“Duck,” says Indrid, spreading his hands. “I don't have an answer for you.”

“ _Nothing?_ ”

Indrid sighs. “There are countless futures in which you succeed, and countless others in which you fail. That's the nature of the grand-scale question you've asked. Every outcome relies on those of the events preceding it. Each action, each changing variable, limits some possibilities, and expands others. So, possible futures grow exponentially more numerous the longer ahead you look. I can't tell you whether you'll end up with the future you want, because it hasn't remotely been decided yet.”

“But surely you can tell me _something_ , right?” Duck asks, the charge in his eyes the hallmark of a desperate, fledgling hope. “Like, if you see me wearing red in a lot of the bad futures, then I could, y'know, avoid wearing that sweater my sister gave me until this all blows over, stuff like that. Right?”

Indrid shakes his head. It's not a pleasant feeling, the snapping of that hope's neck between his fingers, but it is a familiar one. He hasn't had occasion to speak about his abilities with anybody for a long count of years, but he remembers this well. Everybody always thinks they're the first to have this idea. “Futures rarely depend on one action alone, especially one so trivial as that. Say you're trying to avoid a future where you're struck by a car while crossing the street while wearing a red shirt. You can wear red, or blue, or any color you like, but if you cross the street at the same time each way, and the driver of the car doesn't miss their exit, the car will strike you all the same. Reverse-engineering in this way is all but impossible, there's always more you don't know.”

“Right.” Duck nods, head bowed. “Guess that makes sense.”

And it _hurts,_ watching him deflate. Indrid knows something of what it is to feel adrift, weightless as a dust mote and pushed about by time. “You need to look at everything at once,” he rushes out, because it's the only comfort he can offer. He wishes that he could simply hand Duck his glasses — his _seer's spectacles_ he remembers with a twitch of his mouth — tell him to put them on, and let him see the future as he does, in all its many-branched, flickering glory. But that vision is his alone. “You can't focus on avoiding or attaining one specific future, and you _certainly_ can't get lost in the causality of small things. You'll go mad that way, fixating on one future, wondering if you could change everything if you move a salt shaker a few inches to the left. All you can do — all _you_ can do, Duck, is to make the choices that you deem right, and take what follows as it comes. Take heart from this. I know more of the future than any other being alive, and I don't fear the future that path will lead to, whatever it may be.”

Duck smiles, then, a small thing, mostly directed to the mirrorless surface of the countertop. “Well, thanks for that,” he says. Suddenly, he looks up, squinting. “Although, I gotta say, you weren't quite that laissez-faire when you called us up to tell us a Pizza Hut sign was about to flatten my friends.”

And, well, Indrid supposes, he has a point. “I made a choice,” he says simply. “Considering all that's followed, I have no regrets.”

“I'll drink to that,” says Duck, and takes a swig of that room-temperature eggnog, wincing sharply. “Well. Probably should've seen that one coming.”

“Probably,” agrees Indrid. It really is nice, he thinks, to have company.

A handful of moments pass in silence. Indrid considers what might happen if he offered Duck another drink he'd be too polite to refuse, what might happen if he showed him to the door. Probability tells him that these small possibilities are far more manageable than the fate of the world at this man's hands, much easier to maneuver, to predict. All the same, he grows a bit lost in them, despite his own advice.

Duck reaches out with one finger and pushes the salt shaker between them a few, slow inches to the left. “Anything change yet?” he asks, grinning.

There's a flicker, then, in Indrid's chest, and another at the edge of his vision. He smiles back. “I'll let you know.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> what's up everybody I'm shipping Duck Newton with the literal mothman now
> 
> Comments are love!


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